International Poets

Kelly Tsai（U.S.A.）

Kelly Tsai is an award-winning spoken word poet, theater artist, and filmmaker based in Brooklyn, New York. She has been featured at over 700 performances worldwide including the White House, Lincoln Center, Kennedy Center, Apollo Theater, HBO’s “East of Main Street: Asians Aloud ”and HBO’s “Def Poetry.” She's been honored as a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow in Non-Fiction Literature for her memoir-in-progress The Invisible Word (2017),a Woman of Distinction by the American Association of University Women (2016), an "Asian American Poet to Watch" by NBCNews.com (2015), and a National Leader Awardee by Americorps Alums (2014-2015). She is the daughter of Taiwanese immigrants (Taipei & Tainan). She graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Double B.A., High Honors in Urban Planning and Comparative Literature.

Efe Paul Azino is one of Nigeria’s best-known performance artists and poets. He is the founder and director of the Lagos International Poetry Festival, and director of poetry at the annual Lagos Book and Art Festival. Efe is the producer of the spoken word poetry theater production Finding Home and has appeared at the Berlin Poetry Festival, Johannesburg Arts Alive Festival, Spier International Poetry Festival Cape Town, and the Ake Book and Arts Festival amongst others. His poems have been translated into Afrikaans, French and German. He is an Osiwa Poetry Residency Fellow and For Broken Men Who Cross Often, published by Farafina Books, is his first collection. His new collection, The Tragedy of Falling with Laughter Stuck in Your Throat, is due out in September 2017.

Hirata Toshiko is a prominent poet, writer, playwright. Before moving to Tokyo, she lived in Shimane, Fukuoka, and Kyoto. Her latest book of poetry is The Freedom of Joking Words (Murasaki Shikibu Bungaku Prize). Her other poetry books including Seven Days of Poetry (Sakutaro Hagiwara Prize), Terminal (Bansui Prize), etc. She published a short story collection Seats Two (Noma Prize for New Writers), a script collection Sweet Womb, among others.

Chung Kwok-keung was born and raised in Hong Kong, and graduated from Faculty of Arts, The University of Hong Kong University. His honors include two successive 1st prizes in the Hong Kong Youth Literature Poetry Awards, The Hong Kong Public Library Award for Creative Writing in Chinese, and the Hong Kong Arts Development Council’s Annual Literary Artist Prize. Among his poetry collections are Encircled, Scenery on the Road, Doors and Windows, Wind and Rain, Adrift in the City, Growing House, On the Ordinary, and Umbrellas Blooming in the Streets. His prose includes essay collections Two Cities, The Tree of Memory, Words at First Sight; short story collection Sometimes Forgetful, and Floating Thoughts, a volume of literary criticism.

He is a notable bilingual poet, fiction writer and essayist of Vietnam. As “the typical figure of Post-Doi Moi Literature'” he is also “the best humourist ever.” Unfortunately, his works were considered “harmful” by governmental publication organizations. Among his many poetry anthologies, only one was published entitledNo Sense (2014). The New York-based “Poets & Writers Magazine” wrote, “Dang is praised for his idiosyncratic prose and rebellious style.” His officially-printed works in various genres have created the utmost important turning-point in writing style of Vietnamese literature. As the representative of a completely-new way of discourse with alternative lexical resources of connotation rather than denotation, he pioneers Vietnamese alliteration poetry and a new style named “phac-nhien” that might partly mean rawly-natural.

Alessandro Bosetti (Milano, Italy, 1973) is a composer, performer and sound artist whose works delve on musicality of spoken language, utilizing misunderstandings, translations and interviews as compositional tools. His works for voice and electronics blur the line between electro acoustic composition, aural writing and performance. He created a vast body of work of hybrid, award winning, text-sound and radio compositions for the main Radio's and Electro Acoustic Music studios in Europe as WDR, Deutschland Radio Kultur, Radio France, ABC Australia, ORF, GRM Paris. Current projects include the abstract polyphony dispositive Plane/Talea, The Notebooks based on Leos Janacek speech melodies archives, the monophonic extravaganzas Mini and Maxigolf with Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart, Journal de Bord a music theatre co-production by GMEM/CÉSARÉ/La Muse en Circuit (centres nationaux de création musicale) 2017-2018 and Mask Mirror an instrument and software that reorganizes speech for musical purposes enacting a form of electronic ventriloquism.